November 2016

New developments and curiosities from a changing global media landscape: People, Spaces, Deliberation brings trends and events to your attention that illustrate that tomorrow's media environment will look very different from today's, and will have little resemblance to yesterday's.

“I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision, we shall discover a new and unbearable disturbance of the modern peace, or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television - of that I am quite sure.” E.B. White

Television has an enormous influence on people, bringing the news and entertainment to communities all over the world. In order to recognize the impact of television, in 1996, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 21 November as World Television Day. On Monday, 21 November 2016, the United Nations TV will host an open day at its studios for talks and interactive dialogues on its programming in observance of this day.

In an increasingly changing global media environment, with modern Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) such as computers, Internet, mobile phones, tablets, wearables, on the rise, television continues to be a resilient communication tool. However, the television industry needs to adapt to the changing landscape in order to remain relevant. One of the most dramatic changes in this industry is the growth in the number of connected TV sets worldwide. Internet connected TVs provide interactive features, such as online browsing, video-on-demand, video streaming and social networking. With the mixture of new and old viewing habits, connected TVs are drawing larger audiences.

According to Digital TV Research, the number of connected TVs worldwide will reach the new high of 759 million by 2018, which is more than double of 2013 numbers (307.4 million).

Children in Maputo, Mozambique
Photo credit:
Isabel Blackett/The World Bank

A successful city is economically and culturally vibrant, healthy, safe, clean and attractive to business and tourism, and provides quality of life to its citizens. This vision is appealing but remains hard to realize as developing cities have to cope with changing demographics and climate with limited financial and human resources. The sustainable development goals have given a new impetus for cities to be inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable (SDG11), ensure citizens’ health and wellbeing (SDG3) and secure access to sustainable water and sanitation services (SDG6).

World Toilet Day on November 19th is the opportunity to remind ourselves of a few facts and propose a set of guiding principles for a renewed and revitalized urban sanitation agenda.

Last year, over 100 countries included actions related to land-use change and forests in their nationally determined contributions to fight climate change.

At the World Bank, we’re excited to be part of this next phase of forest action. In April 2016, we launched both a Forest Action Plan and Climate Change Action Plan which take a more holistic and ambitious approach to forests. We proposed to focus on investments in sustainable forest management and forest restoration to enhance economic opportunities for people living in and near forests, but also to help countries plan their investments in sectors such as agriculture, energy and transport in a more thoughtful, ‘forest-smart’ manner – to maximize the benefits of their forest assets.

We have witnessed in recent years the emergence of technology start-up ecosystems across the world. New technology trends are reducing the costs as well as the barriers of access to markets and resources for developing technology start-ups. If in the 1990s an entrepreneur needed $2 million and months of work to develop a minimum viable prototype, today she would need less than $50,000 and six weeks of work.

Entrepreneurs are also surging in emerging economies. India hosts major start-up ecosystems in New Delhi and Bangalore, with their start-ups having raised $1.5 billion in funding in 2016, respectively. São Paulo ranks among the top 20 start-up ecosystems with more than 1,500 active start-ups, closely followed in the region by Santiago and Buenos Aires. Warsaw hosts around 700 active start-ups, and Nairobi is the home of leading African start-ups, such as Ushahidi, M-Pesa or Brck.

Tech start-up ecosystems present new opportunities for emerging economies. Local entrepreneurs develop new business solutions that address domestic demands. For instance, in Kenya, M-Kopa is addressing the demand for energy in off-grid locations, a major issue in the country's rural areas. Unicorns, those start-ups that raise more than $1 billion, are no longer a U.S./Europe-only phenomenon. Indian, Chinese and Indonesian start-ups, such as Lu.com, Flipkart or Go-Jek, have reached this valuation, and African Internet Group from Nigeria is poised to be the first African unicorn.

Start-up ecosystems also create new jobs. Data from New York City's ecosystem on employment generated in the tech start-up ecosystem shows that most of the jobs generated by tech start-ups are not in start-ups themselves, but in local traditional industries that either are influenced or disrupted by start-ups. Think about a bank or a retail company that has to react to a mobile app providing finance or retail business and that needs to hire new talent to develop a competing app. More than 40 percent of these new jobs do not require a college degree. These are jobs like building a website, a basic database, a web or mobile app.

We were standing at ground zero in the fight against climate change, looking at a still body of water and talking. Our group was gathered along the edges of a “farm pond,” a technique used by farmers to enhance agricultural resilience to climate change, which often impacts countries through crippling droughts. A farmer demonstrated the measures he had taken to protect his livelihood from the extreme weather events that were increasingly common in his region.

Tax treaties are like a bathtub; a single leaky one is a drain on a country’s revenues. Photo: Kris Schroeder

Tax officials and experts grappled with the issue of tax treaties several weeks ago at the IMF-World Bank Annual Meetings. This arcane subject has now emerged as a new lightning rod in the debate on fairness in international taxation. As citizens demand that corporations pay their fair share of taxes and some governments struggle to raise enough revenues for basic services, tax treaties present difficult issues.

In August this year, the Government of India approved the recommendations made by the Sub-Group of Chief Ministers on Rationalisation of Centrally Sponsored Schemes (CSS). The rationalisation plan would first prune the existing 66 CSSs to 28, and then further divide them into three categories – six ‘core of the core’ schemes, 20 core schemes, and two optional schemes. The ‘core of the core’ schemes include the pension schemes, MNREGA, and four umbrella schemes targeting “vulnerable sections” of the population. Further, the flexi-funds component of the CSSs would be increased to 25% for the state governments to programme. Another set of recommendations were made around the modalities of release of funds. For instance, the release of a tranche of funds would no longer be dependent on producing an Utilisation Certificate of the previous instalment; and instead, it would be based on the submission of the instalment preceding the last one.

This is another step in the process of improving the governance of CSS in India, with the specific rationalisation exercise being prompted by the ongoing fiscal reorganisation between the centre and state governments. Starting last year, transfers from the centre to state governments went up by approximately INR 1.8 lakh crores. This was a result of the 14th Finance Commission recommendations which increased the devolution of the centre’s tax receipts to state governments from the prevailing 32% up to 42%. This reduced the ability of the central government to continue funding CSSs at their previous levels, and at the same time, provided state governments a greater measure of flexibility in financing its own priority development schemes.

I am always on the lookout for impact evaluations that give us the long term effects of interventions. I recently came across a paper by Pablo Ibarraran, Jochen Kluve, Laura Ripani and David Rosas Shady looking at the effects of a youth training program in the Dominican Republic. While we have some evidence on the long term effects of these kind of programs from developed countries, this is quite possibly the first in a developing context.

Targeted regional and sectoral policies can be game changers in job creation. Photo: Network on Jobs and Development

We recently hosted our first Jobs and Development Conference, and one of the key topics we discussed was the role of governments in creating jobs. We had about 260 participants, and 68 papers were presented (more than 150 considered but not selected for presentation, a high rejection rate that attests to the quality of the papers that were presented).

One of the plenary sessions that I chaired focused on the role of governments in designing and implementing jobs strategies. The consensus has been that jobs will come if countries just fix markets and institutions to promote investment and economic growth. But this is a very simplistic view.

Paul Krugman’s conclusion about the importance of productivity is widely shared among economists. Yet productivity growth across the world has been sluggish in recent decades, in both advanced and developing countries, and restarting it is a central priority for the global development agenda.

Taking stock of what we understand about the productivity slowdown, and mapping out potential areas of policy action, was the focus of a recent two-day conference at the World Bank, “Second-Generation Productivity Analysis and Policy.” The conference, co-sponsored by the European Central Bank and the Competitiveness Network, brought together global experts and development practitioners.

“Bringing the most current advice to our clients about accelerating growth” is a top priority, said Jan Walliser, the Vice President who leads the Bank Group's Equitable Growth, Finance and Institutions (EFI) practice group. “The last 15 years have brought about major advances in the measurement and understanding of productivity growth,” said EFI Chief Economist William F. Maloney. The conference agenda thus sought to “sketch the frontier on the issues that are most relevant” to jump-starting productivity growth in the Bank Group's client countries.

Productivity in Cambodia's apparel and garment industry has, in recent decades, enjoyed sustained growth. This photo shows an apparel factory at the Sihanoukville Special Economic Zone. Photo: Chhor Sokunthea / The World Bank.